The Nuttall encyclopædia : $b being a concise and comprehensive dictionary of general knowledge.

Before the internet, a household's window on the wider world might be a single stout volume like this one, packed with short entries on nearly everything worth knowing.

What it's about

The Nuttall Encyclopaedia is a concise and comprehensive dictionary of general knowledge, gathering thousands of brief entries on biography, geography, history, literature, science, mythology and more into a single accessible volume. Its aim is breadth and convenience: a quick, reliable reference for the general reader seeking a definition, a date, a place or a name.

Themes

As a work of popular reference, the encyclopaedia embodies a period's confidence in the ordering and summarising of knowledge for a broad public. Its selections and emphases reveal what an educated readership of its time was expected to know and value, making it, incidentally, a portrait of an age's assumptions as much as a store of facts.

Why it still matters

Older encyclopaedias are fascinating both as reference works and as historical documents, preserving the state of general knowledge and the outlook of their moment. For readers of period literature they can be a useful companion, and for the curious they offer the pleasure of browsing an entire compact world of information.

Who it's for

Readers who enjoy vintage reference works, students of the history of knowledge, and anyone who likes to browse short entries and follow curiosity from one to the next.